The Great Convergence: Are We Becoming A Normal Country?
On guns and abortion; genetics and red flag laws
Whether June 24 is a date that lives in calumny or with esteem, will, I suppose, be something we learn in time.
As it happens, I am of the view that this is something that needed to happen. Returning abortion policy to the states is exactly what democracy looks like. A one-size fits all policy on health is disastrous, something we ought to have learned during the pandemic when mask mandates and jab edicts compromised public safety and public health. (You might ask if we even believe in public anything anymore.)
Speaking politically here, those pro-lifers who held their nose on Trump’s evident moral failings and backed Trump anyway because of his commitment to judges have indeed been vindicated. Who knew that President “Grab ‘em by the pussy” would have ended Roe v. Wade? Whether the Court ought to have ended abortion rights as a doctrine — or never created them in the first place — is an interesting question. Might we have been less extreme if we had allowed more deliberation?
Science fiction writer David Brin compares the pro-life cause to that of the confederacy — he suggests that there’s a new Fugitive Slave law in effect with these trigger laws — but I’m not so sure that’s right. This is the danger of historical analogies and it’s a bit insulting to to the millions of pro-life activists, many of whom are descendant from abolitionists themselves, who have toiled to bring about the end of Roe. I was among them at the March for Life this past January and something seemed different, something vaguely hopeful.
As a science fiction enthusiast myself — what is science fiction if not speculative history? — it’s interesting to think of a counterfactual world where the Supreme Court didn’t create abortion rights in Roe or defend them over the last half a century. It’s hard to imagine our politics would be as wild as where we are now. What sorts of politicians would we have elected had the matter of abortion been left to the States? I wonder.
Comparisons to the Civil War are lamentable indeed because it raises the stakes of the abortion fight to something approximating civil war. Such talk plays into the kind of America Against Americans insights that China’s Kissinger encourages. Will we allow the passions that so animate the pro-life and pro-choice sides to tear us apart? I think and hope not. There’s a whole book about it by China’s Kissinger — Wang Huning — called America Against America.
Why are women so comfortable using period apps like Flow (which sends that data to China) anyway? We know full well that the Chinese have sought to get that data of pregnant women as part of their biosurveillance state.
We will have our own such state in short order.
Indeed, thanks to Moore’s Law, we have sensors and tracking everywhere. The notion that pro-life organizations and state officials would not avail themselves of these technological advances to stop what they see as the killing of babies is fantasyland.
As I see it a world of period tracking apps and in vitro fertilization cannot easily coexist with an Underground Railroad of sorts for abortion. Maybe I’m wrong but do you really think that foreign governments who seek to cause chaos won’t avail themselves of hacking or interfering here? Of course they will. If you can control your enemy’s reproduction wouldn’t you?
Mass surveillance is here to stay and with it, a lot of reforms are going to be coming simply because people are disgusted. This is ultimately why the meat packing industry, the abortion industry, the oil industry, and the chemical industry are designed to fail. The more the public watches, the more it finds not to like. This is what we mean by progress. Recall that both the vegan lobby and the meat industry like a high price of meat.
The pro-choice activists often deride pro-lifers and claim that they are really only '“pro-birth” and not pro-life.
What would a country that was actually pro-life look like? I suspect it would look a lot like some of the social welfare democracies that the political left so seeks to emulate. It’s easy to envision a single payer system in that way.
In other words, we’d be a normal country.
*****
I confess when Congressman Steve King of Iowa told me four years ago that he was going to defeat Roe vs. Wade I was skeptical. When David Daleiden — my college debating partner — secretly video taped abortionists joking about selling baby bodies I doubted he could actually change things. Still I published those videos despite a ban and I got targeted by the abortion industry for having the temerity to publish his videos. I won, of course, but it was revealing the lengths to which the pro-abortion lobby would go in pushing for speech restrictions and how nearly every right ends up becoming a racket. Let’s not forget that the later an abortion happens the more money the abortionist winds up making.
This 6-3 decision in Dobbs has changed the conversation once and for all about abortion. They’ll be predictable overreactions on both sides and whoever is the most extreme will lose that debate.
For some of my friends the end of Roe vs. Wade is the end of the world. For others, the end of a lifetime of hard work.
I’m here for both groups. We need to figure out how to live together and to deliberate about the issues that matter. What’s important is that we remember who we are.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Whenever you read of these stories on abortion you seldom get the international prespective. Let’s have a look.
America, in other words, is becoming a normal country when it comes to abortion, slowly but surely. Andrew Sullivan seems to have made a similar argument when he pointed out that Germany bars abortion after 12 weeks. Critics of that analysis rightly point out that Germany offers a cradle to grave welfare state. (To which I reply: Hey maybe we will too!)
It’s long overdue. In the main we will be like most European countries: abortion permitted in the first trimester but barred in the second and third.
The abortion pill will be sold through the Post Office and failing that, they’ll be a network of abortion providers throughout the country and perhaps outside of it. My friend Bradley Tusk, who doesn't share my politics, is engaged with a new outfit —Mayday.health — that does precisely that.
Could these restrictions be about something more interesting? The need for as Michael Yglesias calls it — One Billion Americans? I wonder if, perhaps, the deep state wants more natural born Americans for the coming conflict with the Chinese.
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On guns America remains divided, especially after the Supreme Court recognized the individual right to gun ownership. This, too, was long overdue, and something that seemed all but certain after the Heller decision.
For its part the House and Senate voted on a bill that essentially bribed states to enact red flag laws after a series of horrific shootings.
I’ve more or less come to the view that those shootings were what we call “wind-up toys” — identify the mentally ill and then use them to cause chaos. The purpose is to do anything and everything to keep January 6 committee out of the front page. The timing of many of these mass shootings seems awfully convenient. Doesn’t it?
Throughout history we’ve long opposed giving arms to the mentally ill or indigent and that’s precisely what red flag laws are.
To be a man you have to take up the responsibilities of defending the state in its hour of need.
This is the spirit under which I own guns. In a pro-gun country, I’m not going to be the person that’s unarmed and if you are of sound body and mind, you should join me in taking up your civic responsibility.
Polygenic scores might help with the fair enactment of these laws. We could, for example, sequence everyone who wanted to buy a gun and then compare their genetics to those of mass shooters. There must be a biological basis for red flag laws or they will not stand constitutional scrutiny.
One of the best ways, thought, to keep Americans safe is to allow the 20 million of us who own guns to also have facial recognition technology. A world where we could take pictures of people and determine if they were friend or foe is a safer world than one in which we shoot first and ask questions later.
The only thing we Americans like shooting more than guns is pictures of each other.